Two Samsas and the Locked Door: Murakami and Metamorphosis

When reading Metamorphosis and Samsa in Love, what initially caught my attention was the specific ideas Murakami chose to borrow from Kafka. I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of Samsa In Love, mostly since I felt like the tone differed so much from Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is such a thematically rich story,  with themes about war and class, dependence and helplessness, yet the motifs that Murakami drew on  weren't the ones I expected. Murakami's Samsa is the inverse of Kafka's Samsa in terms of their insect-human transformations, so perhaps it makes sense that the idea of connection that stands out in Murakami's work is the inverse of the isolation that fills Kafka's. The motif of the locked door stood out to me in particular in this regard. In Metamorphosis, doors serve as a symbol of the walls that Samsa seeks to maintain between himself and other people, initially being something he wanted to maintain of his own accord, and eventually becoming a choice that others made for him. In comparison to that, in Samsa In Love, the door lock is broken, and the first woman Samsa interacts with comes to fix it. Samsa is incapable of drawing boundaries since he doesn’t understand connection, and the locksmith is the one who sets those boundaries. I thought the reversal was interesting, even if I I wasn’t the biggest fan of the work itself.